7 March 2014

NHL man-games lost and CHIP analysis - 60-game report

This is my latest update for the 2013/14 regular season on which teams have been hit hardest by injuries by trying to place a value on the games missed by players due to injury/illness.

The concept again - multiply each game missed by a player by his 2013/14 cap charge (including bonuses), then take the aggregate of these figures for each team and divide by 82. This indicator of value lost to a team by injury/illness is called CHIP (Cap Hit of Injured Players).

This analysis covers every team up to its 60th game. (This follows on from my 50-game update.)

[Click to enlarge any image]

Commercial break...

For a more regular snapshot, CHIP rankings are also being fed into Rob Vollman's Team Luck calculator on a weekly basis

Alternatively...
Again, for a different indicator of player "value", I've also illustrated a similar metric based on TOI/G alongside the CHIP numbers. Clearly, neither cap charge nor TOI/G are perfect measures of player value, since each have a number of limitations and inconsistencies, but they provide a decent comparison and the results do vary somewhat.

A quick summary of the alternative metric:

TOI/G replaces cap charge as the measure of value in the calculation

For goalies, TOI/G has been worked out as Total Minutes Played / Games Dressed For* - i.e. a goalie playing every minute of 75% of the games, zero in the rest, would end up with a TOI/G of 45 minutes (or close to it, once you factor in OT and so on). [*Actually, "Games Played by Team - Games Missed by Goalie" - I'm not inclined to disentangle any three-goalie systems or minor-league conditioning stints.]

This arguably overstates the worth of starting goalies somewhat, but it's simple and you could equally argue that a workhorse goalie is the hardest position to replace, so it's fair for them to have a much higher TOI/G figure

Where a player hasn't played all year or where a player fairly clearly has a reduced TOI/G figure due to getting injured in their only game or one of very few games, I've used TOI/G from last season (or further back if necessary)

For each player, multiply games missed by TOI/G to get (for a more palatable name) Cumulative Minutes of Injured Player (CMIP)

Take the aggregate of CMIP for the team and divide by games played by the team to arrive at AMIP (Average Minutes of Injured Players) - it feels more understandable expressing this metric as an average per game (whereas CHIP is a running total)

The figures...
The table below shows:

Total CHIP for each team over the first 60 games of the regular season, as well as the distribution of CHIP by position

The player who has contributed most to the team's CHIP figure

The number of players with a CHIP contribution of over $250,000 (think of it as being equivalent to a $1m player missing 20 games or a $4m player missing five games)

AMIP for each team over the same period (e.g. an AMIP of 40:00 could be seen as the team missing two 20-minute per game players for every game this season)

CHIP figures in graphical form (paler bars represent the three "retired" players on LTIR noted below):

The same for AMIP (teams in the same order as the CHIP chart for ease of comparison):

The following is a ranking of teams by CHIP over Games 51-60 only, to further illustrate some of the biggest movers since last time:

10 second analysis...

The Red Wings hit hardest for the second consecutive update (with more Zettersyuk-related pain yet to come)

Conversely, the Coyotes followed up with another very healthy stretch (actually only two MGL - the other two being adjustments from a previous period), which helped them to a very Coyote-like 4-4-2 record over those games

Although the Olympic break fell after the 60-game for a few teams, so not strictly 100% relevant for this update, I make it that there were 24 players who missed their team's last game before the break, but were then available for the first game after the break. Perhaps a slight counterpoint to the complaints about the handful of players who returned from Sochi injured (upsetting one big-shouldered GM to the point he seemingly forgot there was something important he had to do before the trade deadline)

The next lists are the top 30 individual CHIP and CMIP contributions:

With Stamkos, Gaborik and Rinne now back in action, which of the three would you think has the best chance of getting injured again before the end of the year? No joKing.

Where does it hurt?
This is another update of the crude injury-by-location analysis. Again, I’ve just used the descriptions found in the player profiles on tsn.ca, so the figures will encompass all the inaccuracies and vagueness within them. It should give a broad indication, if nothing else, though.

The crude rate of injuries (instances / total games played) has actually dropped from 0.80 per game through the 50-game mark to 0.77 per game now (compared to 0.80 last year, 0.78 in 2011/12 and 0.76 in 2010/11). Related to the Olympic break?

Finally, a look at the Evasiveness Index. This is basically the proportion of injury instances for each team that have been described as either "Undisclosed" or the helpfully pointless "Upper/Lower Body" in the same TSN profiles. I have made no judgement about whether the many instances of "Illness" (i.e. concussion), "Flu" (i.e. concussion) should also be included.

Philip Larsen has managed to sneak in a very rare undisclosed Oiler injury under the radar of the local media, presumably distracted by the rampant competition to see which writer could make last contact with the door hitting Ales Hemsky on his way out.

Notes/Disclaimers

Figures exclude a few minor-leaguers / marginal NHLers (usually an arbitrary judgement on my part) who had been on the NHL club’s IR since pre-season. Generally, if a minor-leaguer gets called up and then injured in an NHL game, his games missed will then count towards the CHIP though. Minor-league conditioning stints immediately after/during a period on IR might be included in the man-games lost figures (but can't guarantee I get it right every time)

For the avoidance of doubt, suspensions and absences due to "personal reasons" are not included in the figures. However, as per previous seasons, any "retired" player still under contract (Savard, Pronger, Ohlund) is still included.

There are undoubtedly a few inaccuracies and inconsistencies in there - I do the best I can with the information out there. Corrections might well be picked up in subsequent updates

The cap figure obviously doesn't really correlate very well to the "worth" of a player in some cases, e.g. where players are seeing out an old (underpaid or rookie) contract or where players are horrendously overpaid and/or were signed by Paul Holmgren

Also, for any player traded where cap hit is retained by his old team, the cap hit used will only reflect that for his current team.

Click HERE if you want a full team-by-team listing of games missed and CHIP/CMIP numbers by each player

Injury/games/TOI info courtesy of tsn.ca and nhl.com - man-games lost info more than likely does not exactly match up with the "official" figures released by individual teams

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About Me

A UK-born/bred/based hockey obsessive.
Doesn't write often, but when he does, it's always almost good.
Creator of CHIP ("a pointless metric") and unvaluable contributor to Hockey Prospectus and the Hockey Abstract team luck calculator.